Funny: Figurative Language Bomb

IM isn't destroying our language

We teachers who sit around the lunch room lamenting the language skills of our students and blaming email and instant messaging all have to take a step back after reading this article, Researchers: written English language will weather LOL storm and will need to find something new to blame.

"Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging, but these teens' messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers," Tagliamonte said in 2006 after completing the research for the paper. "They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn't worry."

Perhaps we can now blame teachers. Naw....how about parents. No, I like parents. I know, the government. If all else fails, blame the government!

Second Language

The Fischbowl recently had a link to this article: Rensselaer to Require All Engineering Students to Study Abroad. It has an interesting discussion about engineers needing a second language because "their eventual careers may require them to collaborate with international clients or co-workers".

I told a teacher I was interested in a science career when I was around 12, he recommend I take German as a second language because so much research was coming out of Germany. Another teacher in high school suggested Russian might be useful to someone going into science for the same reasons. I wonder what language I might recommend to a student today asking me the same question? Chinese? Japanese?

In the late 90's I had a principal who looked into setting up a Chinese language class at the middle school where I was teaching. She was unable to find a teacher who fit our needs at the time so it never came to pass, but she was already thinking ahead of the curve. I know that in a lot of schools, World Languages have taken a back seat to kids trying to meet all their academic requisites. Is it time to re-think our school policies towards a World Language? Should it be an elective or required? Do we need to look beyond the traditional German, French and Spanish?

[Image: Chinese word for luck captured from http://www.chinapage.com/word/chineseword.html]

Speech Accent Archive

The Speech Accent Archive has got to be useful to someone in your school. You can listen to audio files of a native speaker of a language read a passage in English. There are linguistic notes for some of the speakers describing what's happening. The site suggests the following folks might find this useful:

• ESL teachers who instruct non-native speakers of English
• Actors who need to learn an accent
• Engineers who train speech recognition machines
• Linguists who do research on foreign accent
• Phoneticians who teach phonetic transcription
• Speech pathologists
• Anyone who finds foreign accent to be interesting

I am using it to improve my Scottish accent for when I don my kilt and walk around the house telling stories of the founder of clan Gunn, Olaf the Black.

[Image: The Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University. 9 Oct 2007 .]